This from a friend and fellow memo reader who is logical:
Thought of the day
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++If your parents break the law to get you into college you should be expelled from school, they should be indicted, charged and convicted of a felony and may serve some time in jail.ALTHOUGH . . .If your parents break the law to get you into the country .... You should be given a FREE education, healthcare on the American taxpayers dime and EVERYONE should be given AMNESTY!That my dear friend is the logic of a Liberal Democrat.
Yesterday,the Democrat Senator from Hawaii did to Atty. Gen. Barr what she did to Justice Kavanaugh and in the process made a fool of herself. She was also supported in this tragic display by Sen. Harris, Booker as well as the Senators from Illinois. and Connecticut. Their goal was to smear Barr in order to destroy his credibility. They did not succeed unless one is willing to stick a dagger in the man's outstanding history and service to our nation.
Once again Democrats ignore the facts Mueller uncovered in order to do what they believe will help them recapture the presidency in 2020.
Barr offered Mueller the opportunity to see his summary letter regarding Mueller's conclusion. Mueller turned down the offer. Democrats attacked Barr's summation as a lie and yesterday, Pelosi defended their characterization of Barr. Barr expected Mueller to do the job of a prosecutor and he chose to throw the ball, regarding obstruction to Barr. Barr, in consultation with Rosenstein, made the decision Mueller failed to make and now Pelosi et. al say Barr should be impeached.
Seems Democrats are disappointed in Mueller's inability to nail Trump so they attack Barr. Laughable!
Nadler's House Committee is also upset that Bar is unwilling to submit himself to questioning by committee lawyers which has no basis in historical precedence. (See 1 below.)
One would think with Venezuela exploding, China stealing our patents and intellectual property, the world flooding our borders and Iran spreading terror supported by Russia, Democrats would have more to do than waste the nation's time in repeating their thesis, ie. Trump is boorish and incapable of being president because they cannot accept his victory.
This is a party that has reached a level even below the mass media. My view, step aside and let them self-destruct. (See 1a, 1b, 1c and 1d below.)
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Some ying and yang op eds:
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First the New York Times publishes two anti-Semitic cartoons then it defends the Muslim Brotherhood. (See 2 below.)
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1) A Real Attorney General
Bill Barr gets smeared for refusing to duck and cover like Loretta Lynch. The Editorial Board
Washington pile-ons are never pretty, but this week’s political setup of Attorney General William Barr is disreputable even by Beltway standards. Democrats and the media are turning the AG into a villain for doing his duty and making the hard decisions that special counsel Robert Mueller abdicated.
Mr. Barr’s Wednesday testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee was preceded late Tuesday by the leak of a letter Mr. Mueller had sent the AG on March 27. Mr. Mueller griped in the letter that Mr. Barr’s four-page explanation to Congress of the principal conclusions of the Mueller report on March 24 “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the Mueller team’s “work and conclusions.” Only in Washington could this exercise in posterior covering be puffed into a mini-outrage.
Mr. Barr’s four-page letter couldn’t possibly have covered all the nuances of a 448-page report. It was an attempt to provide Mr. Mueller’s conclusions to Congress and the public as quickly as possible, while he took the time to work through the entire document to make redactions required by law and Justice Department rules.
This is exactly what he promised to do in his confirmation hearing. Even Mr. Mueller’s complaining letter admits that Mr. Barr’s letter wasn’t inaccurate, a fact Mr. Barr says Mr. Mueller also conceded in a subsequent phone call. The Mueller complaint, rather, was that there was “public confusion about critical aspects” of his investigation.
Translation: Republicans were claiming vindication for Donald Trump, and Mr. Mueller was taking hits in the press for not nailing the worst President in history. Having been hailed for months as a combination of Eliot Ness and St. Thomas More, Mr. Mueller and his team of prosecutors seem to have been unnerved by some bad press clips.
Mr. Barr told the Senate Wednesday that he offered Mr. Mueller the chance to review his four-page letter before sending it to Congress, but the special counsel declined. Mr. Mueller worked for Mr. Barr, and that was the proper time to offer suggestions or disagree. Instead, Mr. Mueller ducked that responsibility and then griped in an ex-post-facto letter that was conveniently leaked on the eve of Mr. Barr’s testimony. Quite the stand-up guy.
Mr. Barr has since released the full Mueller report with minor redactions, as he promised, and with the “context” intact. Keep in mind Mr. Barr was under no legal obligation to release anything at all. Mr. Mueller reports only to Mr. Barr, not to the country or Congress.
Mr. Barr has also made nearly all of the redactions in the report available to senior Members of Congress to inspect at Justice. Yet as of this writing, only three Members have bothered—Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and ranking House Republican on Judiciary Doug Collins. Not one Democrat howling about Mr. Barr’s lack of transparency has examined the outrages they claim are hidden.
Democrats are also upset that Mr. Barr concluded that Mr. Trump did not obstruct justice regarding the Russia probe. But in that decision too Mr. Barr was behaving as an Attorney General should. Mr. Mueller compiled a factual record but shrank from a “prosecutorial judgment.” Mr. Barr then stepped up and made the call, however unpopular with Democrats and the press.
Contrast that to the abdication of Loretta Lynch, who failed as Barack Obama’s last Attorney General to make a prosecutorial judgment about Hillary Clinton’s misuse of classified information. Ms. Lynch cowered before the bullying of then FBI director James Comey, who absolved Mrs. Clinton of wrongdoing while publicly scolding her. That egregious break with Justice policy eventually led Mr. Comey to re-open the Clinton probe in late October 2016, which helped to elect Mr. Trump.
All of this shows again the risks of appointing special counsels. They lack the political accountability that the Founders built into the separation of powers. Mr. Mueller, in his March 27 letter, revealed again that like Mr. Comey at the FBI he viewed himself as accountable only to himself.
This trashing of Bill Barr shows how frustrated and angry Democrats continue to be that the special counsel came up empty in his Russia collusion probe. He was supposed to be their fast-track to impeachment. Now they’re left trying to gin up an obstruction tale, but the probe wasn’t obstructed and there was no underlying crime. So they’re shouting and pounding the table against Bill Barr for acting like a real Attorney General.
1a) Hey, Mazie Hirono! Who Do You Work For?
Hey Mazie Hirono! Who do you work for? Who is pulling your strings? Surely, it's not the people of Hawaii or the rest of the country.
Your father left the family when you were very young, and your mom managed to bring you and your two siblings to Hawaii. She supported the family by working long hours to put a roof over your head and food on the table. In spite, of your meager surroundings, you managed to get yourself a fine education at the University of Hawaii and prestigious Georgetown Law School.
One would expect gratitude for the opportunity this country offered you, but instead you shamefully and ungratefully had the gall to state to your staff that "people are getting screwed in this country every single second, minute, hour of the day." So, the country that took you in, housed you, fed you, clothed you, and educated you is a country that "screws" everyone every second of every day? Doesn't look like you were screwed, but it does look like you are the one who is screwing the good people of this country.
Wednesday, instead of questioning Attorney General Barr at the Senate Judiciary Hearing, you ran a ten minute monologue slandering a public servant who has served this country for four decades because you are unhappy with the Mueller Report.
You called the President a liar and then you called Attorney General Bill Barr a liar without any evidence to support your charge. Have you no decorum, shame, or respect for not only the office you hold, but for our governing institution? Is the lack of civility you are championing now the new norm? Unlike the uncivilized unstable countries many are fleeing (Somalia, the home of Ilhan Omar, another ingrate), we have for the last two hundred years a system of government in place where civility and respect for the opposition was the norm; however, you immigrants in Congress are tearing apart our House and Senate. How does your lack of civility improve the process of governance? It doesn't!
As an immigrant myself, I resent your lack of gratitude and respect for a country that provided you and your family a safe haven and security not found elsewhere. You're an ingrate and your presence in Congress is divisive and un-American. Over 63 million Americans voted for President Trump, the man you call a grifter, a man who donates his salary and one who has improved the economic lives of all Americans. It is he who has created millions of jobs; not you! It is he who has brought manufacturing jobs back to the States; not you! It is he who has put more money into the pockets of Americans; not you! And it is he who has renegotiated unfair trade deals with Europe and China; not you!
Additionally, Mazie, in this country we don't just "believe women," we believe evidence. As an attorney, you should know that, and if you don't know the basics, then perhaps you are not fit to serve. Men do not need to "shut up!" as you audaciously advised. In this country we all have a voice.
So, before you sit there and slander our Attorney General and our President, invest in a little humility and learn the process by which we govern. Civility accorded by you will help heal a divided nation, and if you can't abide by that, then perhaps you need to take your own advice and "just shut up!".
Shari Goodman is a political activist, educator, and political commentator for American Thinker, World Net Daily, Israel Today, and other publications.
1b) Joe Biden’s Last Ride
Karl Marx himself might think the booming U.S. labor market looks pretty darn good.
By Daniel Henninger
Joe Biden entered elective politics as a councilman in New Castle County, Del., in 1970, just this side of a half-century ago. Remember the Sony Walkman? Mr. Biden, now 76, was in politics for nearly a decade before it was introduced.
The Biden presidential campaign resembles one of those elegiac Western movies set around 1913, with weather-beaten men on horseback trying to pull off one last bank heist before getting run off the range by the arrival of motorcars on Main Street.
To accomplish this improbable feat, Mr. Biden is refashioning himself mainly as two things—the anti-Trump candidate and the second coming of Barack Obama.
The substance of Mr. Biden’s anti-Trump pitch strikes me as mysterious. The main argument for choosing him over the 20 or so Democrats running is that the “Scranton Scrapper” will win back the blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin who gave Donald Trump his margin of victory over Hillary Clinton.
But since last week’s announcement video, one of Mr. Biden’s signature lines has become that Donald Trump poses “a threat to this nation . . . unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.” How weird is it to insult your target audience by suggesting their Trump vote was an act of unprecedented stupidity?
Conventional wisdom rightly argues that many of these people voted against Mrs. Clinton. But her “deplorables” comment doesn’t explain everything. The defecting Democrats also voted against the previous eight years of the Obama-Biden economy, from which these voters had seen little or no benefit.
Mr. Biden may think their vote for Donald Trump was moronic, but many of them would respond: It was the economy, stupid.
As he campaigned in Iowa this week, Mr. Biden began wrapping himself in Mr. Obama’s mantle, pushing the Obama argument that he will rebuild a collapsed middle class. As with his Trump-threat apocalypse, he calls rebuilding the middle class “the moral obligation of our time.”
It would be a good thing if Joe Biden, as Mr. Obama’s heir, got the Democratic nomination. That would offer a clear test of the two models of economic management now competing for the American public’s support.
The Obama-Biden model, effectively shared by all Mr. Biden’s Democratic rivals, is that government primarily should guide the economy. The Trump model, a largely classical conservative approach, is that the private sector primarily should propel economic activity.
An emerging story line of the campaign is that against Bernie Sanders’s socialism or Elizabeth Warren’s regulatory militancy, Mr. Biden offers a moderate, center-leftish alternative. Mr. Biden’s Democratic donor base may think this, but I don’t.
Mr. Obama’s term was, to borrow a Bidenesque phrase, the most left-wing presidency in our lifetime, with the veep happily in tow. It represented the idea of the private economy as a zero-sum abstraction whose only utility is to create revenue that gets extracted by the government and administered as benefits to the public. For modern Democrats the private economy has become basically a strung-up piñata.
The Obama administration imposed an unprecedented array of regulations on every sector of the U.S. economy—finance, energy, telecommunications, health care and on and on. On taking office, the Trump presidency stopped or revised most of these regulations. The Brookings Institution’s “deregulation tracker” is a valuable, detailed record of this historic policy reversal.
Across eight years of Mr. Obama’s presidency—during which he and Vice President Biden gave speech after speech about helping the middle class—the economy grew annually by about 2%. The two-year-old Trump economy is growing at nearly 3%.
With a little effort, one can discover the meaning of 3% growth for average people. This newspaper’s reporters have done that in a series of stories the past year about the tight U.S. labor market. This week the Journal reported in “Women Wanted” how working-class women are finding good-paying jobs in formerly all-guy lines of work, such as long-haul trucking and electrical trades.
To attract workers, employers are creating or expanding benefits. For all the soaring rhetoric of Mr. Obama and now Mr. Biden, that didn’t happen in their two terms.
The irony of the $2 trillion Trump-Pelosi-Schumer infrastructure gesture is that there aren’t enough construction workers in the U.S. to do the work available right now, partly because more young men are choosing college over construction. This suggests a need for more immigrant labor, but we won’t get into that.
We’ll leave it to Donald Trump to defend his private jobs economy against the Obama-Biden-Sanders piñata economy. But the dismissal of this long-hoped-for reality of expanding opportunity across all income classes and races as a “sugar high” or “unequal” is cynicism on a grand scale. As in the Washington Post poll this week that actually asked if the current economic system “works to benefit all people or mainly works to benefit people in power.”
One almost wonders: If Karl Marx himself were here today, might he look around at what has been happening in the U.S. labor market the past two years and think, “This isn’t so bad after all”?
1c)
‘Medicare for All’ Isn’t Medicare
Democrats mislead voters by appropriating the name of a popular program they actually seek to abolish.
By Robert Pozen
More than 100 House Democrats have endorsed Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare for All Act of 2019. Fourteen Democratic senators have co-sponsored a similar bill from Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The title is deeply misleading. It implies that the current Medicare system would be extended to all Americans. In fact, Medicare for All differs from Medicare in fundamental ways—with much broader coverage, no cost sharing, and fewer choices of health-care plans. While America needs a debate about health care, it should be based on an accurate description of the alternatives.
Medicare for All would cover a panoply of dental, vision and mental-health services not covered by Medicare. Under the latest version of the House bill, the federal government would also pay for all long-term nursing and home care—estimated by the Urban Institute to cost roughly $3 trillion over the next decade.
The program would replace Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, as well as all employer-sponsored insurance and direct individual insurance (including the ObamaCare exchanges). It would cover not only uninsured American citizens but every U.S. resident—potentially including illegal as well as legal immigrants.
Despite this substantial expansion of coverage, Medicare for All would not require beneficiaries to contribute premiums, deductibles or copayments. By contrast, most parts of Medicare require some form of cost sharing by patients. Medicare Part B, for outpatient medical expenses, has a standard premium of $1,626 a year with an annual deductible of $185, plus a 20% co-payment, according to the official Medicare website.
Proponents counter that the proposal would reduce federal health-care spending in three main ways—lower drug prices through government negotiations, lower reimbursement rates for medical services, and lower administrative costs by eliminating insurance companies. They also argue the proposal would increase federal tax revenue by repealing the deduction for employer-provided insurance. But these four factors are already built into the previous estimates. However you cut it, Medicare for All would inevitably lead to massive tax increases.
Neither the House nor the Senate bill includes much detail on financing higher federal spending. Mr. Sanders’s staff released a paper in April with revenue options—imposing a premium tax on employers and employees, increasing the top income-tax rate, imposing a wealth tax, closing tax loopholes and so on. But the paper does not address the budget implications of these options or the challenges of getting them through Congress.
Medicare for All would also replace Medicare’s current method of paying fees for services to every hospital, nursing home and other institutional provider. Instead, a new federal board would set an annual budget for each provider, which would receive one lump sum for current operations and another for capital expenditures. That board would be expressly forbidden by current Medicare for All bills from using quality metrics—which would be necessary to prevent providers from skimping on quality with lump-sum payments.
All this would force a radical change in the current business models of most hospitals and other Medicare providers. Although they would generally have discretion over how to spend their lump-sum payments, they could not use them to make “profit or net revenues.” Yet each provider would bear the risk if these payments were insufficient to cover actual costs. Many hospitals would limit the volume or scope of their services until they were sure they would break even for the year.
Finally, Medicare for All would eliminate the plan choices Medicare now allows. Elderly Americans don’t have to get outpatient or drug coverage from the government. Some opt to stay with their employer plans and others choose private providers through Medicare Advantage. Medicare for All would prohibit any insurer or employer from privately offering any services covered by this legislation—which means essentially all medical services.
Medicare for All allows even less in the way of plan choice than other single-payer systems. In the United Kingdom, patients may purchase private insurance for medical services even if they are available through the National Health Service. Canada does not cover dental, vision or long-term care, so two-thirds of Canadians purchase these services through private health insurance.
In the coming debate over health care, the label “Medicare” should be reserved for proposals that are built on the existing structure of this successful program. Whatever else “Medicare for All” may be, it isn’t Medicare.
Mr. Pozen is a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and a former president of Fidelity Investments.
1d) Clinton Projection Syndrome
By Victor Davis Hanson
Hillary Clinton recently editorialized about the second volume of special counsel Robert Mueller’s massive report. She concluded of the report’s assorted testimonies and inside White House gossip concerning President Trump’s words and actions that “any other person engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted.”
Psychologists might call her claims “projection.” That is the well-known psychological malady of attributing bad behavior to others as a means of exonerating one’s own similar, if not often even worse, sins.
After 22 months of investigation and $34 million spent, the Mueller report concluded that there was no Trump-Russia collusion — the main focus of the investigation — even though that unfounded allegation dominated print and televised media’s speculative headlines for the last two years.
While Mueller’s report addressed various allegations of Trump’s other roguery, the special counsel did not recommend that the president be indicted for obstruction of justice in what Mueller had just concluded was not a crime of collusion.
What Mueller strangely did do — and what most federal prosecutors do not do — was cite all the allegedly questionable behavior of a target who has just been de facto exonerated by not being indicted.
What Mueller did not do was explain that much of the evidence he found useful was clearly a product of unethical and illegal behavior. In the case of the false charge of “collusion,” the irony was rich.
Russians likely fed salacious but untrue allegations about Trump to ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who was being paid in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to find dirt on Trump.
The Russians rightly assumed that Steele would lap up their fantasies, seed them among Trump-hating officials in the Barack Obama administration and thereby cause hysteria during the election, the transition and, eventually, the Trump presidency.
Russia succeeded in sowing such chaos, thanks ultimately to Clinton, who likely had broken federal laws by using a British national and, by extension, Russian sources to warp an election. Without the fallacious Steele dossier, the entire Russian collusion hoax never would have taken off.
Without Steele’s skullduggery, there likely would have been no Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court-approved surveillance of Trump aide Carter Page. There might have been no FBI plants inserted into the Trump campaign. There might have been no subsequent leaking to the press of classified documents to prompt a Trump collusion investigation.
Given the Steele travesty and other past scandals, it is inexplicable that Clinton has not been indicted.
Her lawlessness first made headlines 25 years ago, when she admitted that her cattle futures broker had defied odds of one in 31 trillion by investing $1,000 from her trading account and returning a profit of nearly $100,000. Clinton failed to report about $6,500 in profits to the IRS. She initially lied about her investment windfall by claiming she made the wagers herself. She even fantastically alleged that she mastered cattle futures trading by reading financial newspapers.
To paraphrase Clinton herself, anyone else would have been indicted for far less.
The reason that foreign oligarchs are no longer donating millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and that Bill Clinton is not being offered $500,000 for speaking appearances in Moscow, is simply because Hillary Clinton is not secretary of state. She is no longer in a public position to hector her colleagues into approving pro-Russian commercial deals, such as the one that gave Russian interests access to North American uranium.
As secretary of state, Clinton also sidestepped the law by setting up a home-brewed email server. She transmitted classified documents over this insecure route and lied about it. And she destroyed some 30,000 emails that were in effect under subpoena. Anyone else would have been indicted for far less.
In truth, Clinton was at the heart of the entire Russian collusion hoax. Even after the election, she kept fueling it to blame Russia-Trump conspiracies for her stunning defeat in 2016. Unable to acknowledge her own culpability as a weak and uninspiring candidate, Clinton formally joined the post-election “resistance” and began whining about collusion. That excuse seemed preferable to explaining why she blew a huge lead and lost despite favorable media coverage and superior funding.
For much of her professional life, Hillary Clinton had acted above and beyond the law on the assumption that as the wife of a governor, as first lady of the United States, as a senator from New York, as secretary of state and as a two-time candidate for the presidency, she could ignore the law without worry over the consequences.
For Clinton now to project that the president should be indicted suggests she is worried about her own potential indictment. And she is rightly concerned that for the first time in 40 years, neither she nor her husband is serving in government or running for some office, and therefore could be held accountable.
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2) NY Times Comes to the Defense of the Muslim Brotherhood
ByClarion Project
The New York Times came to the defense of the Muslim Brotherhood in the wake of the news that the Trump Administration was planning to designate the group as a terrorist organization.
In a breathtakingly disingenuous article, the Times omits fact after fact in its claim the Brotherhood is a “missionary” group that eschewed violence for decades.Clarion Project documents the decades of violent activities by the Brotherhood, both inside and outside Egypt (where it originated) and in America, where one of its groups was convicted in the largest terror-financing case in U.S. history.
On July 8, 2013, while Obama was president, then White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said, “We also condemn the explicit calls to violence made by the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Yet 2014, the Obama administration rejected a request to designate the organization as a terrorist group, claiming the group was non-violent. “We have not seen credible evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood has renounced its decades-long commitment to non-violence,” the White House said.
You can read Clarion’s definitive rebuttal of that claim by clicking on the following article:
Obama Label of Brotherhood as Non-Violent Patently False
Watch Clarion Project National Security Analyst and Shillman Fellow Ryan Mauro explain why the Muslim Brotherhood should be designated as a terrorist organization and how already the debate over this issue has become toxic:
Meanwhile, The New York Times issued a second “apology” for printing an anti-Semitic cartoon worthy of being published in the Nazi-era paper Der Sturmer.
In course of a worldwide outcry over the publication of the cartoon, which depicted a dog with the head of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wearing a Star of David leading a blind President Trump wearing a Jewish skullcap, the Times managed to publish yet another anti-Semitic cartoon. The paper has since announced that it suspended the publication of all future syndicated cartoons.
As with first “apology,” the second one also failed to mention that publishing the cartoon was morally wrong, not to mention patently false. The first apology merely called cartoon “offensive” and noted that the paper had made an “error in judgment for publishing it.” The second apology labeled the cartoon “appalling and bigoted” but ultimately threw a large part of the blame on Trump for riling up anti-Semitism in the country.
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